As a past advisory board member of the University of Washington Human Interface Technology Lab and a member of the board of directors of WorlDesign – perhaps the world’s first Virtual Reality applications company – I’ve been optimistic about VR and Augmented Reality (AR) for a long time. And as the world ramps up for the Next Round of Getting Excited about VR, I am all for it.

Well, there might be a couple of caveats. First: VR, when and if it finally comes into mass acceptance, will mostly be feeding an entertainment market. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s a very large market, but VR, in my opinion, will never really break out. If you think about all of the videogame players together, plus some, that’s the future of VR – at least for now.

Second: , There seems to be an increasing amount of conflation between VR (often driven by smartphones in a holder) and 3D. Let’s put it this way: when View-Master comes out with its own VR set, you know things are getting way too confusing.